Journalists in Ferguson, Mo., don't face as many risks as our colleagues in Syria, but that's not much to brag about.

Hardly anything compares to the dangers journalists face in Syria, where James Foley, a freelance photojournalist for GlobalPost and Agence France-Presse, was beheaded by a jihadist from the Islamic State.

The Internet posting of the ghastly murder suggests that the global jihadi wars have crossed into a new stage: Journalists are not just at risk but targets to be kidnapped and held for ransom or gruesomely killed for propaganda purposes.

Syria has led the world for the past two years as a dangerous place to practice journalism, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, of which I am a board member. At least 70, most of them Syrians, have been killed covering the conflict, and more than 80 have been abducted, CPJ's highest tally in its 33-year history. About 20, most of them Syrians, are currently missing in the country.

Journalists don't face risks like that for practicing journalism in this country, which is one of many excellent reasons to live in this country.

But in Ferguson, where protests and some eruptions of violence followed the Aug. 9 police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed, black 18-year-old, journalists sometimes have been arrested, detained, manhandled or harassed by police, according to various accounts.

For weeks now Ferguson, Mo. has been in the national spotlight. Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed an 18-year-old, unarmed, Michael Brown. The bulk of our photo coverage of the unrest that followed in Ferguson has come from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch photographers through our... (Anthony Souffle)

Since Brown's death, local or state police have arrested or detained at least 11 reporters or photographers, according to a running tab on the Poynter Institute's website. Even Amnesty International, for the first time in this country, sent human rights observers to the city to support free speech and press.

Among the first and most widely reported incidents, Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery and Huffington Post reporter Ryan Reilly were arrested and briefly put in a holding cell after police ordered them to leave a McDonald's. Lowery was "illegally instructed to stop taking video of officers" in the McDonald's, as Washington Post Executive Editor Martin D. Baron later wrote, and then "slammed against a soda machine and then handcuffed."

In fact, while it is illegal in some states to record other people without their consent, federal courts have upheld a First Amendment right to record police as they perform their official duties in public, unless the person with the camera is interfering with police work.

At least some of the police in Ferguson apparently interpreted "interference" too broadly in the fog of tear gas and other mayhem.

But since nobody loves the media for long, it seems, even when First Amendment rights are at stake, some critics have reasonably questioned whether some reporters have crossed the line and actually asked for trouble.

For example, Noah Rothman at the Hot Air site allows that media are "correct to challenge authority, to broadcast images that the local police do not want seen and to serve as a check on the power of law enforcement and the military."

But he goes on to object that "it is also clear that the press is no longer serving as objective chroniclers of the proceedings. In many ways, the media appears to believe that it is an active participant in the events in Missouri. What's more, the press appears to be relishing this role."

Relishing? Us? As media became part of the story, Rothman says, they almost began to treat themselves as being central to it.

That's not an illegitimate complaint. Sometimes when TV reporters, for example, decide to report live from the center of the action or close to it, they should not be surprised if police shove them aside or threaten arrest. Both police and the media need to work toward reducing disorder, not adding to it.

Both sides also have a role in protecting and preserving the most important underpinnings of our democratic society. News media need to be free to inform the electorate and hold public officials accountable.

And at a time when the meaning of such words as "journalist" and "objectivity" have become blurred in the age of bloggers and opinionating cable TV news anchors, we in the media have to guard our most precious commodity: credibility.

The public will help us defend press freedom as long as we show them it is worth defending.